


Reincarnate

by LavenderTheMenace



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate History, F/M, Gen, The characters are not Good People, canon-compliant alternate history, the pov character is at best an accomplice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 12:28:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19109677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LavenderTheMenace/pseuds/LavenderTheMenace
Summary: Herpo the Foul, maker of the world's first Horcrux, did not act alone. From the very start, he had at his side a singularly terrifying bride.Efrosini the Healer outlived her husband.





	Reincarnate

**Author's Note:**

> So this is deeply non-compliant with Pottermore and whatever JKR has said since I wrote this in August of 2016. But it's not like we're taking her word as gospel these days, anyway, right?
> 
> Not sure if this will be continued or not. It takes place entirely before the events of the books, and in theory is canon-compliant. Which may change if I pick it up again, who knows?
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> \- Lav

In the age of man there have been many wars. Countless and unremembered by many, some conflicts are brought forth in modern memory, nearly so fresh as the century after which they were fought. These are the lucky ones, whose fighters are, if not known individually, remembered by what their feats in battle accomplished. Others, with many a wizarding war among them, are not so fortunate, and lost entirely to the myths of time. Present became past. Past became history. History became legend. Legend became myth. And myth was lost into the mists of time, until these acts of bloodshed and war had passed from all memory, but those who had lived them.

Those that had died in them.

While the souls of the fallen may have moved on, walking the earth once more, their memories were untouched when they again were sheathed in human flesh, and new people they became. Upon death, their souls remembered, but that Veil, woven so carefully by Death itself, halted all recollection until bodies turned to dust once more. So it was for all souls, until a law of nature it became.

For all but one.

 

\----

 

In the times of old, among the ancient city states of what in the modern age would be known as Ancient Greece, there lived a sorceress of great power and humble beginnings, whose name would be lost in the mists of ages, while the man who urged her to greatness was known only by the darkest of men in their hallowed shadows, covered in dust and hidden by pages that cracked and fell to fine dust as they were turned. She was the daughter of a physician, Leandros, and a necromancer and teacher, Chryseis. She, their third child and only daughter, was dubbed Efrosini, for the joy in her laughter upon her birth.

Efrosini was a clever child and an avid scholar under her mother’s tutelage. She held little interest in the world outside her scrolls of healing and necromancy until a new apprentice came to learn under her father, an orphaned Parselmouth by the name of Damocles. His talent was of great use in the temples of Asclepius, where snakes were used in healing rituals and roamed free on the ground where the ill slept. In what seemed no time at all to the young couple, they had fallen in love, passionate and all-consuming, to the joy of Efrosini’s parents.

For many years after their marriage, Efrosini and Damocles lived happily, healing the sick, and seeing to the well-being of those around them. Theirs was a simple life, in a far-flung temple for healing, but it brought them joy. This was made greater only upon the news one winter that Efrosini would soon bear a daughter. Damocles all but cried in his happiness, having had no family of his own before his fortunate apprenticeship to Leandros.

This was when the war came. Their city state had declared war on a nearby wizarding government of the same, and all witches and wizards of age to fight were being called to the front lines, that they might defend their citadel and heal their own warriors. Sorcerers were instructed to call down the powers of the heavens if they must, but to defeat the enemy at all costs, before their own homes were lost in the battle. And the magical men and women listened, until the sky seemed red with the blood both sides had spilled.

For a time it seemed that Damocles and Efrosini would escape the fight, safe in their temple and tending the ill and unfortunate, but it was not to be. On the cusp of their victory, the magical city states were tipped from the previous balance, and soon war-wizards approached their home, and they were called to battle.

And for several months, Efrosini and her beloved Damocles fought side by side, and all was as well as it could be. They were feared in the fight and shared what joy was to be had with their comrades while Efrosini carefully hid her condition from their superiors, that she would remain with he who held her heart. Nothing, the duo determined, would keep them apart. Nothing but death, which surely, by the gods would not come upon _them._

They were wrong. A surprise attack struck their camp one balmy night at the height of summer, tents exploding in walls of flame when an enemy sorcerer called down lightning to launch the attack. Damocles urged his wife to run, and run she did – up to the point at which she saw a witch begin to call down a curse her husband. Damocles only ever turned around when his wife cried out, throwing herself in the path of the spell, and fell to the ground, limp and unmoving.

It is unsure what events followed this, as few but Damocles ever remembered in the first place, and the last to survive the millennia was Efrosini herself, who never could stand to hear tell of the incident that began her beloved’s course to the title the war gained him, that of ‘Herpo the Foul.’

Efrosini had only woken a month after the battle’s rage had quieted, leaving none of the enemy behind, and Damocles, now known as Herpo to all for his fearsome presence in the war, named for the ‘creeping animals’ he controlled, a changed man from his fear at being left alone once more. As it happened, the daughter that would have been theirs was no more, and never again could Efrosini bear a child. She raged at the gods for taking this joy from her, from her beloved, and leaving naught but shells of people behind.

So it was that they decided to leave their old life behind. The Asclepeion they had so loved was razed to ash with the rest of their home, and Efrosini’s family had scattered in the wind, her parents as ash, her brothers to only Hermes knew where. To the island of Kos the couple travelled, and there they built a new Asclepeion, high on the ground and safe nestled under the sky, and they made it as perfect as they could manage, pouring all their hopes and dreams into its stones and the charms which they used to preserve it. This, they decided, would last beyond the centuries, until even the time of its building had been lost, and would forever provide care to those that needed it.

And for a time, Efrosini began to think that they could be happy again. They had many apprentices, several of whom she and her husband – only she called him Damocles any longer – saw as their own children, caring for them fiercely. Her hair had since begun to grey, and Damocles took great pleasure in kissing the silver streaks at her temples, and she in running her hands through his salt-and-pepper scalp.

Then, on the anniversary of their daughter’s death, Damocles came to her in their bedroom and presented her with his work. His greatest achievement, he called it, as way to foil Hades himself.

“I will not let them keep me from you,” he declared, holding her to his chest and not understanding why she cried. “I won’t risk leaving you ever again.”

She couldn’t convince him it was madness, though it was. So she helped him instead. She took every scrap of work he had developed over the decades, right under her nose, and poured over them, correcting any possible barrier or deficiency she could find. If her beloved would tear his soul to stay on Earth, then she would help him if for no other reason than to prevent that soul from being irrevocably destroyed. He may be doing this so as not to lose her in this life, but she would ensure she never lost him in any of them.

He split his soul. And she helped. Apollo save her, she helped him.

Efrosini… she had thought that was the end of it. But soon her darling Damocles pushed her to make one, his mind filled with the thought of having not one life with her, but a thousand years together. But she couldn’t. Her husband could manage those dark magicks, but she could not. Her realm of expertise was in black magic, necromancy, and in healing. Though she helped him, and used her own knowledge to make his mutilation as safe as possible, she would not do that to herself. Instead, she drew on her knowledge of the magic of death, and in particular, the veil Death wove from the water of the River Styx.

When a soul died and went forward to be reborn, it was bathed in the River Styx, and cleansed of all memory of the life it led before. One would only remember the past lives while they were unburdened by living flesh, due to the veil on their soul, meant to refresh and unburden them of the past before each life began anew.

It was a gift, from Death. The chance to live again and again, to have new chances unburdened by millennia of the old.

Efrosini destroyed hers. To stay with her husband.

She knew in her heart that this would be an act she would regret, but she did it anyway. She was all that Damocles had, and she could not leave him to his loneliness.

He didn’t trust her unique brand of immortality, at first. Only after it was proven to him, a hundred years after she irrevocably destroyed the her veil, did he believe her. For twenty-six years after her first death, he had cursed her folly, believing he had lost her forever. But no. She had merely been reborn, ten years after her death, and had been forced to wait until she was sixteen to find him again. She crossed from the Tamraparni kingdom, disguising herself as a man on a ship bearing dyes to Arabia, from there went to Judea, crossed the sea back to Greece, and then at last came once more to their little island.

Damocles could hardly believe it was her, garbed now in a Hindu skin and seemingly a peer to the young apprentices they once taught, while he held on to his many years. But it didn’t matter to them. They had one another.

Thus it was for many centuries. ‘Herpo’ fell further and further into his darkness, and Efrosini stayed by his side, faithful to him through it all. To her death, time and again, and through her rebirth, under countless names, in those early days. After a while, not even she remembered all of what she had been called, some names being discarded before her first decade was out, upon the realization that a life gave her no viable way to reach her beloved. Another death, and she was reborn again, this time perhaps able to reach Damocles sooner.

When Herpo the Foul reigned over the sole remaining magical city-state, she stood by him as his queen, smiling through her horror at what her darling, gentle beloved had become. His snakes, once renowned for their ability to heal, were feared among wizards for their association with the Foul Conqueror of Greece, who would unleash them upon those unwary who stood in his way.

But she loved him, nonetheless. And though they never did have the child they had once yearned for – Damocles’ rituals having stripped the possibility from him in an exchange for power – they were happy enough. And she loved him.

And while some may call that time dark, Efrosini never could. For while she would at times weep for what her dearest love had become, most days, it was easy to forget. She taught her students at the Asclepeion of Kos, passing on knowledge of healing and magic to those who would seek it. Her husband ensured that every night he would be by her side, holding her close while they kissed by candle light, the full moon visible outside their window. They delved further into magic, their mutual love of knowledge bringing forth so many wonderful discoveries – a new species even.

Damocles’ experiments to make his snakes stronger bore fruit and he picked Efrosini up by the waist – no small feat in the towering Norse body she inhabited during that period – and spun her around, kissing her in his delight. He dubbed the creature a basilisk, and took great joy in studying her. Later, he took further joy in terrorizing his enemies with her.

Personally, in their home, Efrosini always called the little one Basil, and would sooth the fretful creature with warm water and plump mice.

This did not last, however. An age had passed, and at its end there was no room for Herpo the Foul in Greece. A Hero rose up, whispered to have been chosen by the gods to destroy the conqueror who now ruled the wizarding city-states with an iron fist, and had for half the past millennia. A Trojan wizard called Iason, ‘to heal.’ He had sworn to heal the world of ‘the festering wound that is Herpo the Foul.’

And he did it.

In Arbon, known to the modern ear as Albania, Iason found Herpo’s Horcrux, made from the wedding veil Efrosini had worn upon her marriage to Damocles, and destroyed it with a curse of his own making, the Fire of Fiends. Damocles fell to the ground and screamed when half his soul was turned to less than mist, gone for eternity. Efrosini ran through the Asclepeion to him, trying to find what was wrong.

It was not a hard thing to find. The faint tether that Efrosini had always seen with her Black Sight, that most necessary skill to necromancy, connecting Damocles to half his soul was gone, with nary a trace that it had ever been. Seeing it, Efrosini held in her weeping, and raged.

But rage did nothing. Iason raised the people against her beloved. Against her. She faced countless students she had cared for and taught, and they stood to destroy her, the woman that enabled the foul ruler they all hated. Seeing this, Efrosini could hardly believe that lack of care she felt. But… if it was every student she had ever loved, or the man that had pushed her knowledge of magic, who had loved her and cared for her through five centuries… she would choose him. Always. How could she not?

So they fought, the two of them, against what seemed the whole world, Muggle and wizard alike, until that moment when Efrosini felt a prickle on the back of her neck, and turned to see a flash of silver sword, and her husband’s head fly dawn the hill from the Asclepeion, to land at Iason’s feet.

A snarl from behind, her shielding spells forgotten, and Efrosini’s magic went _wild._ Her husband’s soul was gone, never to return, unable to make the journey to Hades without its other half, and she held every man and woman present responsible. Herself included.

In an explosion of ice, all within sight of Efrosini found themselves struck through, great shards of frozen water in each and every one of their hearts, killing them all. Efrosini, healer to her last, no longer cared.

Though wizards had chafed under the rule of Herpo the Foul, under Efrosini the Evil they lived in fear for two centuries. Every time they had thought her to be gone, she returned ‘possessing’ a new ‘innocent’ and once more striking down those that tried to stop her.

So it seemed, then, that her rule would last forever. It did not.

 

\----

 

For the first time since Damocles… since Herpo had died, Efrosini found herself born as a male child, to a large and joyous family in Jerusalem. Her… his earliest clear memories of that life, happening just as his small child’s body was developing enough to hear and understand and remember, were of his family and everyone they knew rising up with a man he later learned was called ‘The Hammer’ and of his mother exclaiming that the oil was a miracle.

That life was one of much reflection for Efrosini, called Manoach now. He grew up, met people… there was one, a girl a little older than her… him… that Manoach thought she… he could love, but didn’t dare even try to. She was still too close to Damocles’ death and all that had followed.

Still, it was not a bad life. It was a small one. A happy one. It was warm enough to keep her from returning to Greece, so it was certainly something, little life though it may have been.

So the centuries went, Efrosini eventually managing to fall in love again in some of her lives, having families and having joy, as her first parents had hoped when they named her for that first moment of mirth, the giggle when she was born. Some lives stood out more vividly than others as the ages past, and some were more exciting.

She was Galina, in love with Klara, and they fostered many beautiful, wonderful children who would not have otherwise had a home, nor would they have survived in the harsh Russian winter.

He was Cyrus, handsome warrior and easily in love with many, and begetting many children with very little care – looking back, he often wondered what had come over him, in those days.

They were mother, daughter, sister, son, father, brother, comrade in arms, lover, parent and by the time they reached their second millennia, by their admittedly sketchy reckoning, it had all blurred together. Their latest life, as Emma Carthridge, was a new one. It had been some time since she had fought in war, and very rarely had she been open about it as a woman. But now she was an officer in the Women’s Army Corps and loving every minute of it. She found that it was men who more often caught her eye in this life – a bit of a blessing, she thought, given that a friend of hers from ROT-C had just been discharged after someone sent polaroids of him with his boyfriend to his commander.

Emma tried not to feel guilty that she hadn’t agreed to be his cover, his ‘beard’ as a few friends referred to it. But she’d had hope.

 


End file.
